Performance and flexibility have historically been viewed as opposing goals in network system design. The emergence of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) software in networking has pushed the struggle to achieve both performance and flexibility in the same system to the forefront of the requirements of next-generation networking. The fundamental building blocks of network application designs are Packet Forwarding and Control. Conventional ASIC-based designs combine Packet Processing and Control into custom hardware, achieving performance at the expense of flexibility, development cost and complexity. At the other end of the conventional design spectrum lie “server”-based approaches, which place Packet Processing and Control on general purpose processors, thereby retaining flexibility, but at the expense of performance.
Commonly-owned patent application Ser. No. 09/679,321, incorporated by reference herein, advanced the state of the art by providing a Programmable Network Server and Device. An aspect of this application is that it provided a platform for performing Packet Processing and Control applications that is dynamically and remotely loadable such that new network service applications can be written and deployed on servers without deploying network personnel to the server location and without interrupting or re-routing traffic that would otherwise pass through the device.
Although the invention of this application solved many conventional problems afflicting network application designs, it would be desirable to extend the principles thereof in new and useful ways.